100 Photographs: A Collection by Bruce Bernard - Bernard: A prints among men

Bruce Bernard was an immensely respected and well-loved picture editor who died in 2000. He is best known for his work at the Sunday Times Magazine during the 1970s, and for his book Century (Phaidon 1999), a compendium of significant images for each year of the last century. But Bernard was more than just a wizard picture editor. He was also a photographer - his portraits of painters were recently on show at Tate Modern - and a key figure in 1950s bohemian Soho. Friends with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud (there are two portraits of Bernard in the current Tate Britain show), he had an eye for an image honed by close association with these leading painters.

In 1996, the Littlewoods heir James Moores asked Bernard to put together a photographic collection. Bernard enjoyed scouting high and low for work at international art fairs, auctions and flea markets, and shortly before his death he edited the collection down to 100 images that "truly stimulated and satisfied" him. (He had originally hoped to buy another 50 or so images, but insanely rising prices encouraged him to downsize.) The resulting "rather unpredictable hoard of basically serious booty" currently enlivens the V&A's sepulchral Canon Photography Gallery.

Casting your eye over these 100 images is the visual equivalent of listening to a wonderfully eclectic compilation CD. Big hits lead on to unexpected unknowns, and there are endless variations within a distinctive but unified mood. The overall tone is a sea of sepia - colour hardly ever makes an

appearance, and when it does it is highly subdued, as in Toby Glanville's portrait of a young plasterer. But within this there's a democratic mix of famous and found, amateur and professional. There are some famous names certainly - Weegee, Diane Arbus, Eadweard Muybridge, Man Ray - but the best work is by a plethora of humble Anons. These quirky images effervescently punctuate the more self-consciously significant masters.

It is through the anonymous gems that we get a peek into Bernard's preoccupations: there is a penchant for blurred movement (a child unable to keep its head still in nursery) comic oddity (four genteel ladies up a tree) and sexy morsels (female students skinny dipping at night).

But if anything links this collection as a whole, it's a pervasive humanism. From Don McCullin's bereaved family in New Guinea to David Wise's toughly graceful Girl in Hartlepool Pub, people predominate, in the full complexity of their internal life.

The rest of the cold, grey Canon gallery has been filled with a second exhibition, a selection of work by six contemporary documentary photographers. After Bernard's preponderance of small sepia snaps, the impact of big colour glossiness offers a satisfying fix. Worth noting are Tina Barney's images of the English upper class: for all their lavish vibrancy, these are sensitive dissections of the relationships between people and their surrounding decor.

But it's Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's pictures of South African prison gangs that tell the most compelling tale. Each member has an imaginary uniform, memorised to the tiniest detail and transmitted orally from decade to decade. The prisoners' gritty comments (and those of their transvestite lovers) next to these lavishly poignant images make for a riveting encounter.